When I was little I saw you feeding on books.
Worried about finances, our mother hoped you'd become a governess. She made assumptions she was unequipped to revisit.
You couldn't breathe in the life assigned you.
Changing your name, you leapt away...
. . . to cut to secrets beaneath the skin.
Declaring years off your age deflected unwanted speculation. A precocious boy was undersandable.
After taking your fees and energy, they resolved in the end to withhold your degree, wary of credentialing one "so young".
Lord Buchan weighed in, his title securing yours.
The British Army was the one door open to you, a path to security, not without risk.
A profession, a uniform, a rank. I boasted about you. as if the world had something in store for me, too.
Then you left altogether, to a place on the other side of known.
It took time to know we'd lost you.
Someone told me the story of you and me.
They thought I'd be surprised. I suppose I was. But more real to me was what I learned of the violence done to you.
The world is cruel.
You didn't have a choice about parenting me. From our first moment, the world ruled us out.
I missed you.
In news of your work, I conjured messagtes for me.
They said you were a prodigy.
A path-breaking caesarian delivery, the boy named for you. And you are named Godfather.
Father, in the eyes of God.
I wanted—I needed—to know you.
"A style of conversation . . . greatly superior to that usually heard at the mess table.
"Conspicuous" "the longest sword and spurs"
"A perfect dancer who won his way to many a heart with impeccable manners."
In your home, books and botannical specimens, pet monkeys and birds, and always a dog.
Vegetarian meals. No alcohol.
A considered life. Warm.
A photo of you with your Jamaican attendant John Smith. A family portrait.
I would have liked it there with you.
You took women seriously.
Choosing female hernia for your graduation thesis, a condition exacerbated by corsets/
Diagnosing grief and hopelessness as the cause of a young woman's decline.
Challenging the presumption female patients could possibly receive appropriate care in an army hospital.
Appointing a black healer to manage nursing care.
There's no way to know if you ever looked back in our direction.
Contact with us bore risk beyond endurance. Another violence done to you.
What I don't know of you is so much more than what I've learned.
Did the uniform simplify things?
Did you get used to being careful? I flinched on finding out you beat a laundress for spying on you in the bath.
Did you ever have a confidant, or fall in love, or know someone with a story like your own?
Attachments deeper than kindness and more complex than respect would comfort me. There were clues.
Your protest when not dispatched to a birthing. It was not army business. But the mother was your friend.
The long voyage you made in retirement in to visit a Dutch officer you'd dueled with pistols in your youth.
The record of you weeping in public over an anonymous placard alleging Lord Charles was detected "buggering Dr Barry".
Your abandonment of your post, rushing to Lord Charles' side in his final illness, his doctor to the end.
Your words on the death of Lord Charles: "I am incapable of doing justice to my more than father—my almost only friend . . . ."
In your postings, you detoured from the simple path.
Intervening in the care of lepers, enduring arduous journeys to monitor results.
Fighting a losing battle for regulation of commerce in pharmaceuticals.
Setting out on your own to find a treatment for venereal disease that actually works.
Adding to your daily schedule a private clinic for "paupers and indigent persons".
You were known to enjoy the uniform and the sword, the riding and the dancing, the weddings and the christenings.
"The friends of Dr Barry with a view to marking their high opinion of his merit, invited him to a Dinner."
Though embedded in that world, you didn't subscribe to its tacit understandings.
You threatened a rapist against further abuse of "the Slave Cathryn".
You raged to the authorities on finding a prisoner in such a "state of misery...if he had not been under the special protection of providence, he could not have survived."
You challenged brute confinement of the mentally afflicted.
You removed an imprisoned Chinese laborer to your home for relief from "taunts that . . . will drive him to despair or madness."
You purchased freedom for one enslaved man, and then for another.
One commander erupted against you: "Why ask from Blacks when White Christians are present to answer?"
Did your personal experience inspire you to question things taken for granted?
Were there echoes in your mind of those voices you once knew in London imagining the world as it might be?
If we'd met, would we have talked about the wounds of Ireland?
Would you have told me it's not being in the Church that counts, but whether you count?
A reputation as a troublemaker followed you.
It was said you had the "eyes of a hawk" for signs of carelessness and neglect.
Righteous, unyielding.
"The most wayward of mortals."
"Exhibiting conduct unbecoming of an officer and a gentleman"
Sidelined. Demoted. Court-martialed. Removed to England undxer arrest.
Your voice resonating in the record, defending your good name.
Every storm weathered, secured with ballast of respect: "the greatest physician I have ever met" "an absolute phoenomenon"
At the end of your life you returned to England. But I imagine you more at home in a geography of the mind. Am I projecting?
"I have certainly striven to do my duty towards God and Fellow man."
You named all of your dogs "Psyche". You never explained why.
You may not have been around to teach me things, but somehow did.
Were you raising a rebel flag when you added the name of a Venezuelan revolutionary to yours?
Accountability to what is the true project.
Illness thrives in the dark.
What you need to know runs along the ground.
Do not fear disorder.
